Avatar as innovation

How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Techniques Created
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1…What is Innovation?

Innovation is the development of new values through solutions that meet new
requirements, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding
new ways.

This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, service,
technologies or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and the
society.

Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and,
as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the
creation of the idea or method itself.

Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing
something different rather than doing the same thing better.

The famous robotics engineer Joseph F. Engelberger asserts that innovations require
only three things:

1. A recognized need,
2. Competent people with relevant technology, and
3. Financial support.

In this assignment I mentioned two type of innovation.

Prepared by: Milan Padariya (MBA) Page 1

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2…Incremental Innovation

A series of small improvements to an existing product or product line that usually
helps maintain or improve its competitive position over time. Incremental innovation
is regularly used within the high technology business by companies that need to
continue to improve their products to include new features increasingly desired
by consumers

Incremental innovation (sometimes referred to as sustaining innovation) uses existing
forms or technologies as a starting point.

"Gillette used to make razors with a single blade. Later, one of its diligent students of
stubble asked, Wouldn‘t two blades be better than one? Thus was born the Trac
II. Next came – guess what? – a razor with three blades – the Mach III. I love Gillette
razors – use one every morning."

Other good examples include the,

Apple iPod. The original iPod came in just white, and enabled you to store and play
your mp3 music collection only. Incremental improvements have occurred over time
so that today you can buy them in many different colours; store your family
photographs and even your video collection.

Global Positioning Satellite. These are now common place in motor vehicles to
assist drivers in getting from A to B. GPS systems in cars are an example of an
incremental innovation in which something that already exists has just been
reconfigured to another use.

Intel Pentium Processors. Intel introduced the Pentium 4 computer processor chip as
an incremental improvement to the Pentium 3 chip. Both chips had the same basic
technology but the Pentium 4 introduced new design improvements and additional
features to improve the chips overall performance.


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Motor vehicles. The cars of twenty or thirty years back and beyond could be thought
of as quite basic when compared to the cars of today. Incremental improvements have
occurred over time so that its common to expect a modern day car to include electric
windows, ABS breaks, air bags, cup holders and the list goes on.

Making incremental improvements is important for extending the marketable life of a
product or service.


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3…Disruptive Innovation

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value
network , and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network
(over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology.

The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that
improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first
by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering
prices in the existing market.

I would like to share some examples:

Digital photography: Early digital cameras suffered from low picture quality and
resolution and long shutter lag. Quality and resolution are no longer major issues and
shutter lag is much less than it used to be. The convenience of small memory cards
and portable hard drives that hold hundreds or thousands of pictures, as well as the
lack of the need to develop these pictures, also helped. Digital cameras have a high
power consumption (but several lightweight battery packs can provide enough power
for thousands of pictures). Cameras for classic photography are stand-alone
devices. In the same manner, high-resolution digital video recording has replaced film
stock, except for high-budget motion pictures.

Downloadable Digital media: In the 1990s, the music industry phased out
the single , leaving consumers with no means to purchase individual songs. This
market was initially filled by illegal peer-to-peer file sharing technologies, and then
by online retailers such as the iTunes Store and Amazon.com. This low end disruption
eventually undermined the sales of physical, high-cost CDs.

Desktop publishing: Early desktop-publishing systems could not match high-end
professional systems in either features or quality. Nevertheless, they lowered the cost
of entry to the publishing business, and economies of scale eventually enabled them to
match, and then surpass, the functionality of the older dedicated publishing systems.


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Computer printers: Offset printing has a high overhead cost , but very low unit cost
compared to computer printers, and superior quality. But as printers, especially laser
printers, have improved in speed and quality, they have become increasingly useful
for creating documents in limited issues.

High speed CMOS video sensors: When first introduced, high speed CMOS sensors
were less sensitive, had lower resolution, and cameras based on them had less
duration (record time). The advantage of rapid setup time, editing in the camera, and
nearly-instantaneous review quickly eliminated 16 mm high speed film systems.
CMOS-based cameras also require less power (single phase 110 V AC and a few
amps for CMOS, vs. 240 V single- or three-phase at 20-50 A for film
cameras). Continuing advances have overtaken 35 mm film and are challenging
70 mm film applications.

In this assignment I did not mention any product or service innovation, but it is related
to Entertainment Industry and one of the great entrepreneurial efforts in Film industry.


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4…Is a movie an innovation?
Each film is an entrepreneurial venture, a financial and personal risk that filmmakers
take and often sacrifice years of their lives for. As the audience, we enjoy to immerse
in ever-new stories and characters to touches our minds and emotions.

However, is a movie really an innovation? One can argue.
The generic definition of innovation…

“innovation is different from a novelty: it is the combination that translates a novelty
into a marketable product (or service), so an innovation brings together the newness,
the value it creates and the adoption to something marketable”.

Therefore, also a movie would have to demonstrate these same three requirements in
order to be innovative.

1. Novelty
2. Creating a value
3. Capturing value in a marketplace.

Yes, I am talking about the one of the highest budget movie of Hollywood….

This movie has broken almost all the records of Film industry. This movie was
released in 2009 and become highest grossing film ever.

This film was released in to 2D, 3D and 4D (in some selected theatres of South
Korea) format in all over the world and….

Name of the movie is AVATAR….!!!

The innovations in this movie lie between two kinds of research: Incremental and
Disruptive.

So, it is necessary to know about the movie and innovations of Director.


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5…“AVATAR”

Avatar is a 2009 American epic science fiction film written and directed by James
Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle
Rodriguez, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver. The film is set
in the mid-22nd century, when humans are mining a precious mineral
called unobtanium on Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha
Centauri star system. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued
existence of a local tribe of Na'vi – a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. The
film's title refers to a genetically engineered Na'vi body with the mind of a remotely
located human, and is used to interact with the natives of Pandora.

Development of Avatar began in 1994, when Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for
the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Cameron's 1997
film Titanic, for a planned release in 1999, but according to Cameron, the necessary
technology was not yet available to achieve his vision of the film. Work on the
language of the film's extraterrestrial beings began in summer 2005, and Cameron
began developing the screenplay and fictional universe in early 2006. Avatar was
officially budgeted at $237 million. Other estimates put the cost between $280 million
and $310 million for production and at $150 million for promotion. The film made
extensive use of cutting edge motion capture filming techniques, and was released for
traditional viewing, 3D viewing (using the RealD 3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D,
and IMAX 3D formats), and for "4D" experiences in select South Korean
theaters. The stereoscopic film making was touted as a breakthrough in cinematic
technology.

Avatar premiered in London on December 10, 2009, and was internationally released
on December 16 and in the United States and Canada on December 18, to positive
critical reviews, with critics highly praising its groundbreaking visual effects. During
its theatrical run, the film broke several box office records and became the highest-
grossing film of all time, as well as in the United States and Canada,
surpassing Titanic, which had held those records for twelve years. It also became the
first film to gross more than $2 billion. Avatar was nominated for nine Academy
Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three, for Best Art


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Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. The film's home media
release went on to break opening sales records and became the top-sellingBlu-ray of
all time. Following the film's success, Cameron signed with 20th Century Fox to
produce two sequels, making Avatar the first of a planned trilogy.

It is brief story of Avatar. Now some questions may be raised in mind like,

1. How the idea was generated in the mind of Director?
2. How the idea was grown and implemented?
3. How the development was carried out?
4. What are the stages of development?
5. What are the themes and inspiration of movie?
6. Was Avatar Disruptive Innovation or Incremental Innovation?
7. How the innovator (Here, Director) manage the Innovation risk?
8. How the innovator linked with the innovation?
9. What are the effects of innovation in Industry with respect to Porter‘s five
force model?
10. Who is the behind of success?

You can find answer of these questions in this assignment.


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6…Origin of Idea:

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for Avatar, drawing
inspiration from "every single science fiction book" he had read in his childhood as
well as from adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider
Haggard. In August 1996,

Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which
would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost
$100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but
do not exist in the physical world".

Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined
the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a
1999 release. However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the
story and vision that he intended to tell.

He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for
the next few years. It was revealed in a Bloomberg Business Week cover story that
20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip
for Avatar, which he showed to Fox executives in October 2005.

In February 2006, Cameron revealed that his film Project 880 was "a retooled version
of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological
advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong,
and Davy Jones. Cameron had chosen Avatar over his project Battle Angel after
completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.

The 280,000-square-foot studio in Playa Vista, Calif., has a curious history as a
launching pad for big, risky ideas. In the 1940s, Howard Hughes used the huge
wooden airplane hangar to construct the massive plywood H-4 Hercules seaplane—
famously known as the Spruce Goose. Five years ago, movie director James Cameron
was in the Playa Vista studio at a crucial stage in his own big, risky project. He was
viewing early footage from Avatar, the sci-fi epic he had been dreaming about since
his early 20s. Cameron's studio partner, Twentieth Century Fox, had already
committed to a budget of $200 million (the final cost is reportedly closer to $300
million) on what promised to be the most technologically advanced work of cinema

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ever undertaken. But as Cameron looked into his computer monitor, he knew
something had gone terribly wrong. .

The film—although "film" seems to be an anachronistic term for such a digitally
intense production—takes place on a moon called Pandora, which circles a distant
planet. Jake Sully, a former Marine paralyzed from the waist down during battle on
Earth, has traveled to this lush, green world teeming with exotic, bioluminescent life
to take part in the military's Avatar program.The human settlers are interested in
mining Pandora's resources but can't breathe its toxic atmosphere, so to help explore
the moon and meet with the native Na'vi who live there, Sully has his consciousness
linked with a genetically engineered 9-foot-tall human–alien hybrid.

Cameron wrote his first treatment for the movie in 1995 with the intention of pushing
the boundaries of what was possible with cinematic digital effects. In his view,
making Avatar would require blending live-action sequences and digitally captured
performances in a three-dimensional, computer-generated world. Part action–
adventure, part interstellar love story, the project was so ambitious that it took 10
more years before Cameron felt cinema technology had advanced to the point where
Avatar was even possible.

The scene on Cameron's screen at Playa Vista—an important turning point in the
movie's plot—showed Na'vi princess Neytiri, played by Zoë Saldana, as she first
encounters Sully's Avatar in the jungles of Pandora. Everything in the forest is
luminous. Glowing sprites float through Pandora's atmosphere, landing on Sully as
Neytiri determines if he can be trusted. Playing Sully is Sam Worthington, an
Australian actor whom Cameron had plucked from obscurity to play the movie's
hero. Cameron was staring directly into Worthington's face—or, rather, he was
looking into the face of a digitally rendered Worthington as a creature with blue skin
and large yellow eyes—but he might as well have been staring into a Kabuki mask.

The onscreen rendering of Worthington was supposed to be a sort of digital sleight of
hand—a human character inhabiting an alien body so that he could blend into an alien
world, played by a human actor inhabiting a digital body in a digital world. To make


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the whole thing work, Worthington's performance, those subtle expressions that sell a
character to the audience, had to come through the face of his Avatar. But after
millions of dollars of research and development, the Avatar's face was not only
lifeless, it was downright creepy. It "scared the crap out of me," Cameron recalls.
"Horrible! It was dead, it was awful, it wasn't Sam. God, I thought. We've done
everything right and this is what It looks like?”

The reaction Cameron was feeling has a name. It's called the uncanny valley, and it's a
problem for roboticists and animators alike. Audiences are especially sensitive to
renderings of the human face, and the closer a digital creation gets to a photorealistic
human, the higher expectations get.

If you map human movements and expression to cute furry creatures that dance and
sing like people, then audiences willingly suspend disbelief and go along with
it.(Think of the penguins in Happy Feet.) But if you try to give a digital character a
humanoid face, anything short of perfection can be uncanny—thus the
term. Sometimes audience unease is to a character's advantage; in The Lord of the
Rings the creature Gollum was supposed to be unsettling. But Cameron was looking
for empathy, and in the first footage, that's not what he got.


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7…Idea behind computer-generated face of a blue, cat-eyed human–
alien hybrid:

Well, for one thing, lots of money is riding on it. But so, to an extent, is James
Cameron's stature as an unstoppable force in Hollywood. Cameron has built up
enormous fame and power based on his reputation as a technical innovator—pushing
the science and technology of modelmaking, digital animation and camera
engineering. But Cameron is perhaps even more famous as the industry's biggest risk-
taker, which might have made him a lot of enemies if his risks hadn't been so
spectacularly rewarded in the past. In 1997, the film Titanic taught Hollywood a
powerful lesson in Cameronomics: The director's unquenchable thirst for authenticity
and technological perfection required deep-sea exploratory filming, expensive scale
models and pioneering computer graphics that ballooned the film's budget to $200
million. This upped the ante for everyone involved and frightened the heck out of the
studio bean counters, but the bet paid off—Titanic went on to make $1.8 billion
andwin 11 Academy Awards.

A unique hybrid of scientist, explorer, inventor and artist, Cameron has made testing
the limits of what is possible part of his standard operating procedure. He dreams
almost impossibly big, and then invents ways to bring those dreams into reality. The
technology of moviemaking is a personal mission to him, inextricably linked with the
art. Each new film is an opportunity to advance the science of cinema, and
if Avatar succeeds, it will change the way movies are captured, edited and even
acted.

Filmmakers, especially those with a technical bent, admire Cameron for "his
willingness to incorporate new technologies in his films without waiting for them to
be perfected," says Bruce Davis, the executive director of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences. It adds to the risky nature of Cameron's projects, but his
storytelling has reaped enormous benefits. There's a term in Hollywood for Cameron's
style of directing, Davis says: "They call this ‗building the parachute on the way
down.'"


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But repeatedly pulling off these feats of derring-do requires both the drive of an
ambitious egomaniac and an engineer's plodding patience. "You have to eat pressure
for breakfast if you are going to do this job," Cameron says. "On the one hand,
pressure is a good thing. It makes you think about what you're doing, your
audience. You're not making a personal statement, like a novel. But you can't make a
movie for everybody—that's the kiss of death. You have to make it for yourself."


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8…Idea behind the GONZO effects:

Cameron's dual-sided personality has roots in his upbringing—the brainy sci-fi geek
from Chippewa, Ontario, was raised by a painter mother and an engineer father. "It
was always a parallel push between art and technology," he says. "My approach to
filmmaking was always very technical. I started off imagining not that I would be a
director, but a special effects practitioner.”

Unable to afford to go to film school in Los Angeles, Cameron supported himself as a
truck driver and studied visual effects on weekends at the University of Southern
California library, photocopying dissertations on optical printing and the sensitometry
of film stocks. "This is not bull," he says. "I gave myself a great course on film FX for
the cost of the copying.”

Cameron eventually landed a job on the effects crew of Roger Corman's low-budget
1980 filmBattle Beyond the Stars, but he didn't tell anyone that he was an autodidact
with no practical experience. When he was exposed to the reality of film production,
it was very different from what he had imagined, he recalls: "It was totally gonzo
problem solving. What do you do when Plans A, B and C have all crashed and burned
by 9 am? That was my start. It wasn't as a creative filmmaker—it was as a tech
dude."

Over the years, Cameron's budgets have increased to become the biggest in the
business, and digital technology has changed the realm of the possible in Hollywood,
but Cameron is still very much the gonzo engineer.

He helped found the special-effects company Digital Domain in the early 1990s, and
he surrounds himself with Hollywood inventors such as Vince Pace, who developed
special underwater lighting for Cameron's 1989 undersea sci-fi thriller, The
Abyss.Pace also worked with Cameron on Ghosts of the Abyss, a 2003 undersea 3D
documentary that explored the wreck of the Titanic. For that movie, Pace and
Cameron designed a unique hi-def 3D camera system that fused two Sony HDC-F950
HD cameras 2½ inches apart to mimic the stereoscopic separation of human eyes. The


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Fusion Camera System has since been used for 3D movies such as Journey to the
Center of the Earth and the upcoming Tron Legacy, and at sporting events such as the
2007 NBA finals.

The 3D experience is at the heart of Avatar. (In fact, some suspect that Cameron
cannily delayed the movie's release to wait for more theaters to install 3D screens—
there will be more than 3000 for the launch.) Stereoscopic moviemaking has
historically been the novelty act of cinema. But Cameron sees 3D as a subtler
experience.

To film the live-action sequences of Avatar, he used a modified version of the Fusion
camera. The new 3D camera creates an augmented-reality view for Cameron as he
shoots, sensing its position on a motion-capture stage, and then integrating the live
actors into CG environments on the viewfinder. "It's a unique way of shooting stereo
movies," says visual-effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum.

"Cameron uses it to look into the environment; it's not about beating people over the
head with visual spectacle." This immersive 3D brings a heightened believability
to Avatar's live-action sequences—gradually bringing viewers deeper into the exotic
world of Pandora. In an early scene, Sully looks out the window as he flies over the
giant trees and waterfalls of the jungle moon, and the depth afforded by the 3D
perspective gives the planet mass and scale, making it as dizzyingly real for viewers
as it is for him.


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9…Idea behind the Virtual World:

Yet live-action 3D was hardly the biggest technical challenge. Only about 25 percent
of the movie was created using traditional live performances on sets. The rest takes
place in an entirely computer-generated world—combining performance capture with
virtual environments that have never before been realized on film. Conjuring up this
exotic world allowed Cameron to engage in "big-time design," he says, with six-
legged hammerhead thanators, armored direhorses, pterodactyl-like banshees,
hundreds of trees and plants, floating mountains and incredible landscapes, all created
from scratch. He drew upon his experience with deep-sea biology and plant life for
inspiration.

Sigourney Weaver, who plays botanist Grace Augustine, calls it "the most ambitious
movie I've ever been in. Every single plant and creature has come out of this crazy
person's head. This is what Cameron's inner 14-year-old wanted to see."

To bring his actors into this world, Cameron collaborated with Weta Digital, an
effects house founded by The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. Weta has
created some of the most groundbreaking characters in recent years, using human
performances to anima-te digital creatures such as Gollum in the Rings series and the
great ape in Jackson's 2005 version ofKing Kong. By now, the process of basic
motion capture is well established. Actors are dressed in "mocap" suits studded with
reflective reference markers and stripes, then cameras capture the basic movements of
a performance, which are later mapped to digital characters in a computer.

For actors, the process of performing within an imaginary world, squeezed into a
leotard while pretending to inhabit an alien body, is a challenge. Motion-capture
technology is capable of recording a 360-degree view of performances, so actors must
play scenes with no idea where the "camera" will eventually be. Weaver found the
experience liberating. "It's simpler," she says. "You just act. There's no hair or
makeup, nothing. It's just you and the material. You forget everything but the story
you're telling." Directing within a virtual set is more difficult. Most directors choose
their angles and shots on a computer screen in postproduction. But by then, most of


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the immediacy of the performance is lost. Cameron wanted to be able to see his actors
moving within the virtual environments while still on the motion-capture stage (called
the volume).So he challenged his virtual-production supervisor Glenn Derry to come
up with a virtual camera that could show him a low-resolution view of Pandora as he
shot the performances

The resulting swing camera (so called because its screen could swing to any angle to
give Cameron greater freedom of movement) is another of Avatar's breakthrough
techno-logies. The swing camera has no lens at all, only an LCD screen and markers
that record its position and orientation within the volume relative to the actors. That
position information is then run through an effects switcher, which feeds back low-
resolution CG versions of both the actors and the environment of Pandora to the
swing cam's screen in real time.

This virtual camera allowed Cameron to shoot a scene simply by moving through the
volume. Cameron could pick up the camera and shoot his actors photographically, as
the performance occurred, or he could reshoot any scene by walking through the
empty soundstage with the device after the actors were gone, capturing different
camera angles as the scene replayed.

But all of this technology can lead right back into the uncanny valley, because
capturing an actor's movements is only a small step toward creating a believable
digital chara-cter. Without the subtle expressions of the face, Cameron might as well
be playing with marionettes. Getting this crucial element right required him to push
Weta's technology far beyond anything the company had done before.

In fact, Cameron doesn't even like the term "motion capture" for the process use
on Avatar. He prefers to call it "performance capture." This may seem like semantics,
but to Cameron, the subtle facial expressions that define an actor's performance had
been lost for many of the digital characters that have come before. In those films, the
process of motion capture served only as a starting point for animators, who would
finish the job with digital brush strokes."Gollum's face was entirely animated by
hand," says Weta Digital effects master Joe Letteri."King Kong was a third or so


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straight performance capture. It was never automatic." This time, Cameron wanted to
keep the embellishment by animators to a minimum and let the actors drive their own
performances.

In order to pull more data from the actors' faces, Cameron reworked an old idea he
had sketched on a napkin back in 1995: fasten a tiny camera to the front of a helmet to
track every facial movement, from darting eyes and twitching noses to furrowing
eyebrows and the tricky interaction of jaw, lips, teeth and tongue. "I knew I could not
fail if I had a 100 percent closeup of the actor 100 percent of the time that traveled
with them wherever they went," he says. "That really makes a closeup come alive."

The information from the cameras produced a digital framework, or rig, of an actor's
face. The rig was then given a set of rules that applied the muscle movements of each
actor's face to that of the Avatar or the Na'vi that he or she was playing. To make a
CG character express the same emotion as a human actor, the rig had to translate
every arch of a human eyebrow directly to the digital character's face.

But it turns out there is no magic formula that can supplant hard work and lots of trial
and error. After Cameron complained about the uncanny-valley effect, Weta spent
another year perfecting the rig on Worthington's Avatar by tweaking the algorithms
that guided its movements and expressions until he came alive enough to meet
Cameron's sky-high standards. "It was torturous," Letteri admits. But when Weta was
finished, you could pour the motion-capture data into the rig and it would come out
the other side right.

With all the attention focused on Avatar, anything short of perfection may not be
good enough.Cameron is asking moviegoers to believe in a deep new universe of his
own design and to buy the concept that 9-foot-tall blue aliens can communicate
human emotions. If Cameron is wrong, then Avatar may be remembered as the
moment when the battle for the uncanny valley was lost. If he is right, the technology
will disappear behind the story line, and audiences will lose themselves in Avatar's
world.


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10…Development:

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture
for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Dr.Paul Frommer, a
linguist at USC.[13] The Na'vi language has a lexicon of about 1000 words, with some
30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemesinclude ejective consonants (such as
the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, and the
initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from New Zealand Māori. Actress
Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor
of plant physiology atUniversity of California, Riverside, to learn about the methods
used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the
communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.

From 2005 to 2007, Cameron worked with a handful of designers, including famed
fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe and renowned concept artist Jordu Schell, to shape
the design of the Na'vi with paintings and physical sculptures when Cameron felt that
3-D brush renderings were not capturing his vision, often working together in the
kitchen of Cameron's Malibu home. In July 2006, Cameron announced that he would
film Avatar for a mid 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with
an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects
studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who
had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's
designs. Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different
production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on
the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human
factors. In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality
Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in
a single camera body to create depth perception.

Fox was wavering because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on
Cameron's previous picture, Titanic, even though Cameron rewrote Avatar's script to
combine several characters together and offered to cut his fee in case the film
flopped. Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-
producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future. In mid-2006,


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Fox told Cameron "in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," so he
began shopping it around to other studios, and showed his proof-of-concept to Dick
Cook (then chairman of the Walt Disney Studios). However, when Disney attempted
to take over, Fox exercised its right of first refusal. In October 2006, Fox finally
agreed to commit to making Avatar after Ingenious Media agreed to back the film,
which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the film's official
$237 million budget. After Fox accepted Avatar, one skeptical Fox executive shook
his head and told Cameron and Landau, "I don't know if we're crazier for letting you
do this, or if you're crazier for thinking you can do this …"

In December 2006, Cameron described Avatar as "a futuristic tale set on a planet
200 years hence … an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental
conscience [that] aspires to a mythic level of storytelling". The January 2007 press
release described the film as "an emotional journey of redemption and revolution" and
said the story is of "a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to
settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to
lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival". The story would be of an entire
world complete with an ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and
native people with a rich culture and language.

Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an
estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits will
lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers. A studio spokesperson said
that the budget was "$237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story."


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11…Theme and Inspiration

Avatar is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context
of imperialism and deep ecology. Cameron said his inspiration was "every single
science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the
style of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series and the deep jungles of Pandora
were visualized from Disney's 37th animated film,Tarzan. The director has
acknowledged that Avatar shares themes with the films At Play in the Fields of the
Lord, The Emerald Forest, and Princess Mononoke, which feature clashes between
cultures and civilizations, and with Dances With Wolves, where a battered soldier
finds himself drawn to the culture he was initially fighting against.

In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron was asked about the meaning of
the term Avatar, to which he replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu
gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in
the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body,
a biological body."

The look of the Na'vi – the humanoids indigenous to Pandora – was inspired by a
dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work onAvatar. In her
dream, she saw a blue-skinned woman 12 feet (4 m) tall, which he thought was "kind
of a cool image". Also he said, "I just like blue. It's a good color … plus, there's a
connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually." He included similar
creatures in his first screenplay (written in 1976 or 1977), which featured a planet
with a native population of "gorgeous" tall blue aliens. The Na'vi were based on them.

For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star
crossed love theme, and acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose
from his film Titanic. Both couples come from radically different cultures that are
contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the
competing communities. He felt that whether or not the Jake and Neytiri love story
would be perceived as believable partially hinged on the physical attractiveness of
Neytiri's alien appearance, which was developed by considering her appeal to the all-
male crew of artists. Though Cameron felt Jake and Neytiri do not fall in love right


Avatar???

away, their portrayers (Worthington and Saldana) felt the characters do. Cameron said
the two actors "had a great chemistry" during filming.

For the film's floating "Hallelujah Mountains", the designers drew inspiration from
"many different types of mountains, but mainly the karst limestone formations in
China." According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks
were inspired by Mount Huang (also known as Huangshan), Guilin, Zhangjiajie,
among others around the world. Director Cameron had noted the influence of the
Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains.

To create the interiors of the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers
visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico during June
2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the platform, which
was later replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI during post-production.

Cameron said that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all
the action and the adventure and all that" but also have a conscience "that maybe in
the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature
and your fellow man". He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher
selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are" and that even
though there are good humans within the film, the humans "represent what we know
to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning
ourselves to a grim future".

Cameron acknowledges that Avatar implicitly criticizes the United States' role in
the Iraq War and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general. In reference
to the use of the term shock and awe in the film, Cameron said, "We know what it
feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on
our home soil, not in America." He said in later interviews, "… I think it's very
patriotic to question a system that needs to be corralled …" and, "The film is
definitely not anti-American." A scene in the film portrays the violent destruction of
the towering Na'vi Hometree, which collapses in flames after a missile attack, coating
the landscape with ash and floating embers. Asked about the scene's resemblance to
the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Cameron said he had been
"surprised at how much it did look like September 11".


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12…Development phases of Filming:

Principal photography: for Avatar began in April 2007 in Los Angeles
and Wellington, New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full
live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live
environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're
looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four
months on non principal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified
version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron
and Vince Pace. In January 2007, Fox had announced that 3-D filming
for Avatar would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion
that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. According
to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live
action, as well as traditional miniatures.

Motion-capture photography: lasted 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa
Vista in Los Angeles. Live action photography began in October 2007 at Stone Street
Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, and was scheduled to last 31 days. More than a
thousand people worked on the production. In preparation of the filming sequences,
all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as
archery, horseback riding, firearm use, and hand-to-hand combat. They received
language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film. Before
shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the Hawaiian tropical rainforests to
get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.

During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of
directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system shows the actors' virtual
counterparts in their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust
and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "It's like a big,
powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can.
I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1
scale." Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until
the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron said this process does not
diminish the value or importance of acting. On the contrary, because there is no need


Avatar???

for repeated camera and lighting setups, costume fittings and make-up touch-ups,
scenes do not need to be interrupted repeatedly. Cameron described the system as a
"form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or
change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements".

Cameron gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test
the new technology. Spielberg said, "I like to think of it as digital makeup, not
augmented animation … Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy
that actors and directors only know when they're working in live theater." Spielberg
and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the
equipment.

To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as
a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera
systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images
captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the
live action images as in augmented reality and shown on a small monitor, making it
possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in
the scene


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13…5 Innovations in AVATAR:

Performance Capture Workflow: A lot of the film was captured using a
performance capture technique similar to that of which Robert Zemeckis filmed
Beowulf. So Cameron developed a virtual camera which will allow his to point it at
his actors and see them as their computer generated characters in real time.

Simulcam: A camera set-up which allows them to follow or monitor a virtual
character which was captured in performance capture into a live action environment
in real-time. It also allows them to see what virtual backgrounds will look like in a
live-action shot. I know that Steven Spielberg had a set-up like this on A.I., but I think
it only showed him wireframes of buildings, and was very glitchy. My impression
from Cameron‘s quotes is that the new technology renders something a lot more
visual, probably akin to a video game (likely more last generation).

Facial Capture Head Rig: The actors in performance capture suits also wear a
camera rig on their heads that takes digital shots of the actor‘s face. This allows the
computer generated character to have 100% facial movement, even in the real-time
performance capture workflow mentioned above.

Facial Performance Replacement: In traditional filmmaking they use ADR (or
additional Dialogue Replacement) when filmmakers need a cleaner take of the actor‘s
dialogue, or need to fudge in a new line. But with a traditional film, you really need to
trick a shot to make it work. The lips don‘t always match up, and sometimes, if you
providing an entirely new line of dialogue, filmmakers usually resort to a wide shot or
a behind the head shot, so that you can‘t see the lips of the actor on-screen. Since 60%
of Avatar is performance capture, he has designed a way to insert a new facial
scan/dialogue capture on an existing performance.

Fusion 3-D Camera System: The Fusion 3-D camera system was co-developed by
James Cameron and Vince Pace. The rig uses two Sony HDCF950 HD cameras to
create stereoscopic 3-D. Cameron first used the system on his 2003 IMAX film
Ghosts of the Abyss.It has since been used by Robert Rodriguez on Spy Kids 3-D and


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The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and most recently on Hannah Montana
and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert and Journey to the Center of the
Earth. But I‘m not exactly sure what improvements Cameron made to the rig over the
last five years.


Avatar???

14…A lesson of Managing Innovation risk from Movie:

Who would have guessed that a movie about blue aliens could teach us anything about
new product innovation?

Of course, I‘m not talking about the movie itself, but the story of how it was made –
something that was chronicled in a recent Business Week article.

James Cameron, the creator and director of Avatar, has a reputation for making
Blockbuster movies with cutting edge special effects that deliver billions in
revenue. Films like Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic. That‘s why Fox was all
ears when he came to them with a screenplay for a new 3D film that promised to
change the way that people viewed movies and return people to the box office.

But Cameron also has a reputation for going over budget – way over budget. That‘s
why Fox made a really smart move in managing the innovation risk for this film. They
used an assessment and feasibility step in deciding whether to resource the project.

The idea of proving feasibility before funding product development might seem a little
buttoned down at first. But it seems to make sense even in a free-wheeling and big-
spending industry like Hollywood. With a proposed budget of $237 million, Fox
decided that the investment was just too big to jump in one go. Instead they gave
Cameron $10 million for proof of concept.

Fox‘s approach with Avatar demonstrates another important point too – that invention
and innovation are separate activities. The proof of concept wasn‘t about the invention
or the technology. Cameron had already invested his own money in the invention of
simultaneous 3D and 2D film making technology. The feasibility step was to prove that
it would be commercially viable.

The movie industry has been hammered by an abundance of leisure time choices
including Hi-Def movies on home big screens, video games, TV and the internet. If


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Avatar was going to be successful, Cameron had to create something so compelling and
so unique that people would pay more to go to the theater.

The proof of concept demonstrated that Cameron could deliver on his vision and Fox
eventually lined up the entire $237 million. Of course, with box office results hitting
the $1 billion mark in its first 17 days, the rest of the story is quickly becoming history.


Avatar???

15…Path breaking record on world-wide Box offices:

US AND CANADA BOX OFFICES:

 Highest grossing 3rd weekend
 Highest grossing 4th weekend
 Biggest January weekend.
 Highest grossing movie in US and Canada
 Fastest to reach $600 million.
 Main contributor to the biggest aggregated weekend of all time.
 Highest opening weekend for an environmentalist film
 Largest gross on New Year day
 Highest-grossing CGI star movie
 Highest-grossing paraplegic film
 Highest-grossing environmentalist movie
 Highest-grossing SCI-FI film
 Highest grossing movie released in 2009
 Highest PG-13 grossing movie of all time
 Highest-grossing Martin Luther King weekend
 Most Oscar Nominations of 2010 (9, but all-time record is 14 by All About
Eve and Titanic)

WORLD-WIDE RECORD:

 Avatar became the highest-grossing movie in history on January 25 after only 41
days of play
 The film was No. 1 in all of the 106 markets it opened the week of December
2009


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 Except for India, it was No. 1 in every market worldwide in its second week of
release.
 It was the highest-grossing movie worldwide for 7 weeks in a row
 It became the second-highest-grossing movie worldwide only 20 days after its
initial release
 Highest grossing movie of 2009
 Fastest pirated movie in history
 First 3-D movie to reach $1 billion worldwide
 Reached $1 billion sales outside US and Canada in 28 days
 First movie in history to reach $2 billion worldwide

ALL TIME RECORDS IN OTHER COUNTRIES:

 After 41 days of release it held the record in 24 markets:

 China ($204 million)
 Germany ($157.6 million)
 United Kingdom ($150.02 million) (now beaten by Skyfall)
 Russia ($117.1 million)
 South Korea ($105.5 million)
 Spain ($110.0 million)
 Australia ($105.8 million)
 Chile ($10.5 million)
 Hong Kong ($22.9 million)
 UAE ($7.3 million
 Colombia ($13.6 million)
 Czech Republic ($11.8 million)
 Portugal ($9.3 million)
 Singapore ($8.1 million)
 Ukraine ($8.7 million)
 Hungary ($7.3 million)
 Romania ($5.6 million)


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 Bulgaria ($3.4 million)
 Slovenia ($1.8 million)
 Dominican Republic ($1.3 million)
 Latvia ($1.5 million)
 Serbia ($1.3 million)
 Kuwait ($1.1 million)
 Qatar ($883,412)
 Jordan ($752,520)
 Jamaica ($476,301)
 Bahrain ($896,623)

OTHER RECORDS:

 Highest sixth week sales (over 100M) overseas
 Over $100M in France, China, Germany, UK, Russia
 Highest opening week Italy

 Russia opening theaters
 Highest fourth weekend sales
 Highest Dominican Republic opening weekend
 Gained six weekends in a row at least 100M per weekend abroad


Avatar???

16…About the Innovator (Here, Director)
James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is a Canadian film director, film
producer, deep-sea explorer, screenwriter, visual artist and editor. His writing and
directing work includes The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The
Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True
Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), Dark Angel (2000–02), and Avatar (2009). In the time
between making Titanic andAvatar, Cameron spent several years creating many
documentary films (specifically underwater documentaries) and co-developed the
digital 3D Fusion Camera System. Described by a biographer as part-scientist and part-
artist, Cameron has also contributed to underwater filming and remote
vehicle technologies. On March 26, 2012, Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana
Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, in the Deepsea Challenger submersible. He was
the first person to do this in a solo descent, and only the third person to do so ever

He has been nominated for six Academy Awards overall and won three for Titanic. In
total, Cameron's directorial efforts have grossed approximately US$2 billion in North
America and US$6 billion worldwide. Not adjusted for inflation,
Cameron's Titanic and Avatar are the two highest-grossing films of all time at
$2.19 billion and $2.78 billion respectively. In March 2011 he was named Hollywood's
top earner by Vanity Fair, with estimated 2010 earnings of $257 million.

James Cameron and Avatar

In June 2005, Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled
"Project 880" (now known to be Avatar) in parallel with another project, Battle
Angel (an adaptation of the manga series Battle Angel Alita). Both movies were to be
shot in 3D. By December, Cameron stated that he wanted to film Battle Angel first,
followed by Avatar. However in February 2006, he switched goals for the two film
projects and decided to film Avatar first. He mentioned that if both films are successful,
he would be interested in seeing a trilogy being made for both.


Avatar???

Avatar had an estimated budget of over $300 million and was released on December
18, 2009. This marked his first feature film since 1997's Titanic. It is composed almost
entirely of computer-generated animation, using a more advanced version of the
"performance capture" technique used by director Robert Zemeckis in The Polar
Express. James Cameron had written an 80 page scriptment for Avatar in 1995 and
announced in 1996 that he would make the film after completing Titanic. In December
2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been
to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The
film was originally scheduled to be released in May 2009 but was pushed back to
December 2009 to allow more time for post-production on the complex CGI and to
give more time for theatres worldwide to install 3D projectors. Cameron originally
intendedAvatar to be 3D-only.

Avatar broke several Box Office records during its initial theatrical run. It grossed
$749.7 million in the United States and Canada and more than $2.74 billion worldwide,
to become the highest-grossing film of all time in the United States and Canada,
surpassing Cameron's Titanic. Avatar also became the first movie to ever earn more
than $2 billion worldwide. Including revenue from the re-release of Avatar featuring
extended footage, it grossed $760.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, and more than
$2.78 billion worldwide. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best
Picture and Best Director, and won three for Best Art Direction, Best
Cinematography and Best Visual Effects

Avatar's blockbuster success made Cameron the highest earner in Hollywood for 2010,
netting him $257 million as reported by Vanity Fair.

Awards received by James Cameron
Year Film Role Notes
1984 The Terminator Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Writing
Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival - Grand
Prize
1985 Rambo: First Writer Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay


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Blood Part II
1986 Aliens Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Director
Saturn Award for Best Writing
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic
Presentation
Kinema Junpo Awards - Best Foreign
Language Film
1989 The Abyss Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Director
Nominated for Saturn Award for Best
Writing
Nominated for Hugo Award for Best
Dramatic Presentation
1991 Terminator 2: Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Director
Judgment Day and Producer Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction
Film
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic
Presentation
MTV Movie Award for Best Movie
Mainichi Film Award for Best Foreign
Language Film
People's Choice Award for Favorite
Dramatic Motion Picture
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding
Dramatic Presentation
Nominated for Japan Academy Prize for
Outstanding Foreign Language Film
1994 True Lies Director, Writer Saturn Award for Best Director
and Producer Nominated for Japan Academy Prize for
Outstanding Foreign Language Film
1997 Titanic Director, Writer, Academy Award for Best Director
Producer and Academy Award for Best Film Editing
Editor Academy Award for Best Picture


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Golden Globe Award for Best Director
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion
Picture - Drama
Empire Award for Best Film
Amanda Award for Best Foreign Feature
Film
Eddie Award for Best Edited Feature
Film
Blue Ribbon Award for Best Foreign
Language Film
Broadcast Film Critics Association
Award for Best Director
Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics
Association Award for Best Director
Directors Guild of America Award for
Outstanding Directorial Achievement in
Motion Pictures
Producers Guild of America Award for
Motion Picture Producer of the Year
MTV Movie Award for Best Movie
Film Award for Best Foreign Language
Film
Japan Academy Prize for Outstanding
Foreign Language Film
Mexican Cinema Journalists - Best
Foreign Film
International Monitor Award for
Theatrical Releases - Color Correction
Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award
for Best Director
Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award
for Best Film


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Florida Film Critics Circle Award for
Best Film
Kids' Choice Award for Favorite Movie
Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award
for Best Director
Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award
for Best Film
Mainichi Film Award for Best Foreign
Language Film
National Board of Review Spotlight
Award - For the use of special effects
technology
Online Film Critics Society Award for
Best Director
Dramatic Motion Picture
Motion Picture
Satellite Award for Best Director
2003 Ghosts of the Director and Nominated by the Broadcast Film Critics
Abyss Producer Association for Best Documentary
2009 Avatar Director, Writer, Golden Globe Award for Best Director
Producer and Golden Globe Award for Best Motion
Editor Picture - Drama
Empire Award for Best Director
Empire Award for Best Film
Award for Best Editing
Award for Best Action Movie
Japan Academy Prize for Outstanding
Foreign Language Film


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Lumière Award for Live Action 3-D
Feature [Film]
Youthfulness Award for Favourite Flick
New York Film Critics Online Award
for Best Film
Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for
Best Editing
Santa Barbara International Film
Festival Lucky Brand Modern Master
Award
PETA 's Proggy Award for Outstanding
Feature Film
Environmental Media Award for Feature
Film
St. Louis Gateway Film Critics
Association Award for Most Original,
Innovative or Creative Film
Saturn Award - Visionary Award
Saturn Award for Best Director
Saturn Award for Best Writing
Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction
Film
Scream Award for Best Director
Scream Award for 3-D Top Three
Teen Choice Award for Favorite Sci-Fi
Movie
People's Choice Award for Favorite 3-D
Live Action Movie
People's Choice Award for Favorite 3-D
Animated Movie
Cinema of Brazil - Best Foreign
Language Film


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Italian National Syndicate of Film
Journalists - Best 3-D Film Director
Nikkan Sports Film Award for Most
Popular Film
Rembrandt Award for Best Foreign Film
Venice Film Festival - Most Creative 3-
D Film/Stereoscopic Film of the Year
(after release) 2,396th star on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame
(after release) Visual Effects Society -
Lifetime Achievement Award


Avatar???

17…Some Findings from this Assignment:

Avatar as Innovation: Disrupting the Film Industry

Why do we care about disruptive innovation?
 It‘s cool.
 It‘ll make us rich and well-respected.
 It‘s the natural way to leverage our big, expensive MBA brains to add
value to our teams, projects, and organizations. Yeah.

While there are many fascinating angles to analyze Avatar‘s innovation
We are going to focus on three key areas

Three key areas of Focus
 Financial
 Technological
 Social

Financial Innovation
 Ludicrously massive financial success
 Highest grossing movie of all time ($3B)
 Broke Blu-Ray sales records of 2.7m in 4 days.
 Raised the price point for movie tickets From $10 to $14 for 3D, and
$16 for IMAX 3D

Incremental: - Willingness to increase costs of production
- New capital costs for theatres
Disruptive: - Premium product priced above IMAX and 2D
- James Cameron‘ intended to shift the balance of powers within
the industry


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Technological Innovation
 James Cameron is considered ―part Scientist, part Artist‖ – developed new
3D movie making technology
 Revolutionary 3D Fusion Camera System modeled after the eye
 Performance Capture Animation

3d camera to disruptive

1. Cameron took almost a decade off between Titanic and Avatar to develop his
dream for 3D
2. The Fusion Camera was modeled after the eyes capturing two perspectives
simultanous
3. Cameron also created new cameras, new screens, new soundstages
4. New Animation System allowed for actor to avoid lengthy makeup but also do
more than read a script. Cameron‘s perfomance capture system allow actors to
truly act despite a largely CGI or animated products

Incremental : - 3D Fusion Camera System
- Performance Capture Animation
Disruptive: - 3D : A renewed and exploding Platform

Social Innovation
 James Cameron
 Visits to Brazil‘s Amazon and Alberta‘s tar sands
 Social Action inspired by Avatar
 The Avatar Project: a program to support military amputees
 Avatar-themed Palestinian protests
 Avatar-themed protests in Jakarta to protect orangutans

Incremental: -Using Fictional stories to inspire social action.
-Coordinating social action with existing organizations &
movements


Avatar???

Disruptive: -Avatar‘s scale and power have inspired grassroots social
action across the globe. It‘s a platform.
What says Porter‘s five force model after AVATAR as Innovation:

• Digital Imaging
• Cameras
• Production Skills
Suppliers
• Technical
Training
• 3D Accessories
• Raised cost of
entry • Increase in
• Threat to Compe production
New
smaller,
emerging Entrants Firm titors
costs
• Shift in
production Marketing
houses and positions

• Digitizing Theatres
Buyers • Imax Expansion
• Movie goers paying more

So, Finally…………….
Was Avatar Disruptive Innovation or Incremental Innovation?
And answer is…………..

It was not only Disruptive. It was also Incremental
Innovation…..


Avatar???

18….Bibliography

James Wigney (August 15, 2010). "Avatar director slams bandwagon
jumpers".Herald Sun. Australia. Retrieved August 16, 2010.

Johnston, Rich (December 11, 2009). "Review: AVATAR – The Most Expensive
American Film Ever … And Possibly The Most Anti-American One Too.". Bleeding
Cool. Retrieved March 29, 2010.

Wilhelm, Maria; Dirk Mathison (November 2009). James Cameron's Avatar: A
Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora. HarperCollins.
p. 4. ISBN 0-06-189675-6.

Britt, Russ (January 4, 2010). "Can Cameron break his own box-office record?
'Avatar' unprecedented in staying power, international sales". MarketWatch (Dow
Jones & Company). Archived from the original on January 06 2010. Retrieved
January 4, 2010.

Subers, Ray (May 13, 2012). "Weekend Report: 'Avengers' Shatters More Records,
'Shadows' Mostly Sucks". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved May 13, 2012

Barnes, Brooks (December 20, 2009). "'Avatar' Is No. 1 but Without a Record".The
New York Times (The New York Times Company). Archived from the original on
December 23 2009. Retrieved December 20, 2009.

"Avatar fastest film to break $1 billion mark". Hindustan Times. India. January 5,
2010. Retrieved February 18, 2010.

Fritz, Ben (December 20, 2009). "Could 'Avatar' hit $1 billion?". Los Angeles
Times (Tribune Company). Archived from the original on December 22 2009.
Retrieved December 20, 2009.


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Han Sunhee (February 5, 2010). "'Avatar' goes 4D in Korea". Variety. Archivedfrom
the original on February 10 2010. Retrieved February 8, 2010.

"Top Grossing Movies in Their 5th Weekend at the Box Office". Box Office Mojo.
IMDb. Archived from the original on January 18 2010. Retrieved January 19, 2010.

"Top Weekends – 7th". Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Archived from the original on
February 03 2010. Retrieved February 1, 2010.

"All Time Worldwide Box Office Grosses". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the
original on January 28 2010. Retrieved January 27, 2010.

Cieply, Michael (January 26, 2010). "He Doth Surpass Himself: 'Avatar' Outperforms
'Titanic'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 28 2010.
Retrieved January 27, 2010.

"9. James Cameron | Top Ten Billionaires In The Making | Comcast.net".
Xfinity.comcast.net. 2010-09-21. Retrieved 2012-03-23.

Thompson A (2009). "The innovative new 3D tech behind James
Cameron'sAvatar". Fox News. Retrieved December 25, 2009.

Broad, William J. (25 March 2012). "Filmmaker in Submarine Voyages to Bottom of
Sea". New York Times. Retrieved 25 March 2012.

"National Oceanography Centre heralds Cameron achievement". NOC. 26 March
2012. Retrieved 5 July 2012.


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19…Photo Gallery


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Avatar as innovation

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